“Betrayal is something you should never come across unless you’re stupid enough to trust that traitor with the trilby hat.”

Honestly standing for the 109 from Glasgow, the palms of my hands sulked inside my trench coat pocket, staining the ticket and note lying there beside them. I had no idea it would be this warm around these parts, although the tramp in the corner seemed far from content in his scuffed up sleeping bag.

“Just a wee bit of regret may have passed through my system at that point, just a bit of doubt, but it’s funny how far promises can go.”

I find myself, randomly musing at my own stubbornness for I should know that he isn’t that stupid. But a genius plus a genius equals an idiot sometimes. The piss stench ridden platform was hardly the place to exercise my mind I conclude, so, reluctantly, I follow the orders of the conductor and stumble my way onto the carriage.

From one shitty platform to another, I feel like throwing up on that man’s boots, even curling up in that other tramp’s scuffed up sleeping bag; even though that man is wearing a blood stained trilby hat.

II

It was only 3 years ago since my friend left me; “Exploring what this nation has to offer” apparently. Thought he was nuts personally, but then again, when did anything personal matter to him anyway? He left his wife (they had only married two years before) and his 1-year old son, something I never quite understood, and something I realised, in time, I never would understand. Because I’m no miracle and he’s certainly not a saint; he’s just an average man; even wears a trilby hat upon his scruffy head. He’s average, other than the fact that he left his wife and child to take the retort of his own mistruth brutally on the chest.

III

Lightning strikes with all the conviction for the convict it needs; sparkling; imminent; tormenting.

IV

We’d been through everything together, been tortured together, watched the game together, killed together, had a beer together. Then he ghosted into thin air, like his silhouette on the condemned lands.

I know him though; “None for nothing; something for reason” is what he used to say on the front. The front of the Ranger’s ground of course, the Govan Stand to be precise. He hasn’t been to a single match in the years he’s been away; say’s something about his loyalty really.

V

That traitor left without a trace; from straight out the textbook, twisted evasion from the spotlights.

VI

He was a pretty wealthy man, my friend; one of those blokes who you never really thought belonged with mud on his trousers, and one that you always wondered where he got his dough from. Perhaps it’s paranoia or perhaps it’s something worth getting you teeth into. But how can you openly suspect your best friend of anything? Even stealing the five-pound note you had lying on the chest of draws next to the lamp? If you can trust your life in a trooper, you can trust your life in a friend right?

VII

Those hours lasted so long to me,
Tripping, stalling and stuttering for shelter
Under that canopy of utopia;
Sparkling beyond the dropping Jew.

The malevolent coward, he left me for dead.

VIII

Every 24 hour of every day I want to reach out and ring his neck if it weren’t for the binds holding my arms back, although, oddly, I can’t feel them. My view seems distorted of him, maybe that’s what happens when your respect for someone falls out of place, but how should I know?

Dresses are pretty—
They have bows and secrets and special pockets
For cigarettes and Barbie combs;
Skipping is fun—
Hard hands and hard stone and hard feet
And hard feeling all meeting at the tip
Of whimsically bent ballet shoes;
Sanctuary fades into faces of water,
Breathing colonies built up by toothpaste and bloody gums—
And faucets turn, the faucet handles turn,
Spinning, grinning skulls with candles stuck inside,
We cut loose our kite strings.

My pockets have 6 dollars, an unbreakable barber comb
And a very breakable hand clutching a very breakable thigh
And that thigh clutches a very breakable hip and that hip
Grasps onto a gelatin chord, sleeping—away in its dream world,
Traveling the skies, starving for that shiver feeling we feel
When we’re careless
And free
And skipping
And making smiling canvas Jack-o-lanterns
Out of each others eyes.